Following Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, MSNBC host Al Sharpton defended President Obama while chiding Republicans over differences in tax policy, though it was never disclosed to viewers that Sharpton owes the federal government millions of dollars in back taxes.
Obama proposed $320 billion over 10 years in tax increases on capital gains income and the country’s top earners while suggesting tax credits for middle-income families.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, delivered the Republican Party’s rebuttal, rejecting any higher taxes. She also shared an anecdote about her childhood experience, saying that as a child, her mother tied bread bags to her feet on rainy mornings in order to keep her single pair of shoes from getting dirty while walking to school. Ernst grew up on a farm in Red Oak, Iowa.
As part of MSNBC’s post-speech analysis, Sharpton claimed that Obama “specifically said where he wanted to tax. He specifically talked about tax credits to the middle class. She warmed us all up with the bread bags around her feet … he’s not talking about raising taxes for those with the bread bags, he’s talking about raising taxes for the rich. So how do you go from bread bags to defending the top 1 percent not having to pay taxes?”
Sharpton, who is also a frequent visitor to the White House, has admitted to owing the federal government roughly $5 million in back taxes, individually and through his National Action Network nonprofit. He has maintained that he is working with federal agents to make payments and lower his tax penalty.
Kelly McBride, a media ethics expert and vice president of academic programs at the Poynter Institute, said Sharpton’s status as a tax delinquent is negligible compared to his other offenses.
“I think Al Sharpton has been absolutely guilty of exploiting his conflicts of interest. For instance, when he was covering Trayvon Martin for MSNBC,” McBride said.
Sharpton was at the center of protests involving the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012. Though directly involved in calling for the prosecution of Martin’s shooter, Sharpton also covered the event on his primetime MSNBC show and interviewed Martin’s parents multiple times.
“That was a clear conflict of interest that the audience needed to know because it was obviously going to color the way that he presented the story to the audience,” McBride said. “There’s a lot about Al Sharpton that suggests conflict of interest and he’s not really a journalist for MSNBC, and MSNBC has made it clear that they are more enamored with his ability to present his point of view than they are with avoiding his conflicts of interest. So, I guess in the sort of range in the number of conflicts … his tax problems are like small potatoes.”
McBride added that Sharpton’s standing as a tax delinquent would be of little concern to MSNBC’s left-leaning audience, regardless of a disclosure by the network.
“If MSNBC wanted to aggregate a broader audience, maybe independents and conservatives … then it would make business sense to them to develop transparency around their commentators and analysts,” she said. “But their business strategy seems to be to target a particular audience, liberals, so they don’t necessarily have any inclination to provide that transparency.”
A spokesperson for MSNBC declined to comment.
